The Moth by James M. Cain

a pro. Denny called himself Rex Atlas, but I settled for Jake Healy. We gave out that we were Washington “sand lotters,” whatever that meant, but it seemed to get by. Denny worked on my brows with some kind of dye he got, so they’d be brown, instead of yellow. For the pictures, whenever they were taken, he made little pinches of cotton, that we carried up the sleeve of our jerseys, and would stick in our mouths, between the gum and the lip, upper and lower, and it certainly gave us a queer, buck-toothed look all right. Looking back at it now it seems funny. It didn’t then. I felt ashamed, and if we were caught I didn’t know what I’d say to Byrd. From then on I was doing all kinds of things I couldn’t look myself in the eye over. I wasn’t a cocky, tingle-fingered kid any more. I was a guy with muscles for rent, that took no pride in what he did with them, and wanted to talk about something else whenever the subject came up.

9
    I T WAS IN THE Christmas holidays that Margaret called, and asked me to a party at the hotel New Year’s Eve. I said I’d come if I could, as it was still heavy on my mind about Easton, and I wasn’t much in the humor. But then, the morning of the party, it came out in the Sun, under an Easton date line, about the marriage, and it turned out she was even more prominent than she had said, because it was on the society page, and got some space. So I thought to myself: My young friend, you’re going to the party. So I put on the black tie the Old Man had given me the previous Christmas, and went. I was surprised at the change in her, as I hadn’t seen her in some months. She had slimmed quite a lot, so she wasn’t so corn-fed and had a figure. And her face had lost the blobbiness it had had, so it was reasonably good-looking. She had on a pink dress that went nice with her dark hair, so I shook hands and admired the new shape, and she didn’t seem to mind that kind of talk at all. When the music started I asked her to dance. Denny was there, and he’d got a load of the reconditioned shape, so while the fiddlers were tuning he whispered that by God, he was going to do something about that. But who she danced off with was me.
    Then I asked her again, and after that again, and if there was anyone else she danced with I don’t know who it was. Supper was served in the main dining room, where the hotel celebration was going on, and the party orchestra moved in there, hitting it up at one end of the room with the main orchestra at the other, so of course that meant I danced with her all the time. When the bugle blew and then both orchestras started Auld Lang Syne, I danced her out in the hall and around a corner, and as the clock struck twelve I kissed her. Her lips were hot and wet and soft. They said one thing and one thing only, and I let them say it. Then somebody ran by with a horn and we broke. “Jack, I’ll have to go back.”
    “This hallway is no good.”
    “My studio might be better.”
    “Hey, what’s this?”
    “If you had come around, I’d have showed it to you.”
    “I’ve been away. What kind of a studio?”
    “Music.”
    “Where?”
    “Here. In the hotel. Just a suite, but they fixed it up for me. The piano is a Christmas present. It’s a Steinway.”
    “Yeah, that we’d expect.”
    “Well, it’s the best make there is.”
    “Of course. When do I see this studio?”
    “... You want to see it?”
    “Sure.”
    “When?”
    “Why—whenever.”
    “Tonight?”
    “Why not—this morning?”
    She looked at me and I danced her back in the dining room and pulled her up against me so hard I wonder she could breathe. She began to whisper. I was to say good night when the rest did, and get my things from the check room, and go out, and on up the street toward my car. But then in the basement of the hotel, on the Charles Street side, I was to find a door, with steps leading down to it. Over the sill was a key, and I was to let myself in and take a turn to the